THE UNSPEAKABLE GENTLEMAN
of settled affairs and good living. Over them and over the town, those eight years had passed with a light hand.
But it was not our town I had come to visit. I found Ned Aiken, as I knew I should, with the Eclipse in harbor. He was seated on his door step by the river road, as though he had always been planted in that very place. I remember expecting he would be glad to see me. Instead, he took his pipe from his mouth, and gazed at me steadily, like some steer stopped from grazing. Then he placed his pipe on the stone step, and rose slowly to his feet, squat and burly, his little eyes glinting below his greasy, unbraided hair, his jaw protruding and ominous. Slowly he loosened the dirty red handkerchief he kept swathed about his throat, and raised a stubby hand to push the hair from his heavy forehead. Then his face relaxed into a grim smile, and he seated himself on the step again.
"You've changed since last I saw you," he said; "changed remarkable, you have. Why, right now I thought you might be someone else."
Had Brutus also been laboring under the same delusion?
I told him I was glad we were still on
[17]
